While I am gratified that hundreds of thousands of people have viewed (and throughly enjoyed) the youtube video that I created for www.howobamagotelected.com I have been distressed by the general nature of the liberal response (just go to the comments section of the video and see for yourself!).

While I guess I should not have expected much from the followers of a false Messiah virtually installed by an adoring media, even I have been a bit taken aback by the absurdity of much of the reaction to the video and the Zogby poll that I commissioned.

Ziegler rebuts five arguments, two of which are ad hominem and really don’t merit a response (he’s a racist for doing the poll, and he’s conservative and therefore not credible), although Ziegler answers those charges as well. The other three don’t hold water, either, but at least are arguments:

McCain voters were probably just as dumb. Ziegler’s offered a double-or-nothing deal to anyone who wants to recreate the same poll for McCain voters. If that survey shows the same results, he’ll pay the cost of both polls, but if the results are significantly different, the challenger has to pay for both polls (reimburse Ziegler for the first). Ziegler’s fairly confident he’ll get the better of that challenge, and he’s probably right.

The poll Ziegler commissioned has an inadvertent control — the Palin questions. These respondents were highly cognizant of Sarah Palin’s details, but not of Obama or Biden’s. That reflects on the media more than the voters, and most people missed the point of this exercise. It wasn’t to show Obama voters as ignorant, but the media as complicit in ensuring that they remained ignorant, at least in terms of Obama.

Questions were biased or wrong. None of them were wrong in the sense of having inaccurate information. One can criticize the question about seeing Russia from Palin’s house, which Palin never said but Tina Fey did in her satire of Palin. Otherwise, the questions themselves all accurately reflected the events of the campaign. None of them should have been terribly obscure, either, but again, that depends on how well the media covered these events. Quite obviously by this poll result, the media covered Bristol Palin’s pregnancy and Sarah Palin’s wardrobe far more effectively than Joe Biden’s plagiarism or Barack Obama’s admission that his policies would make energy prices skyrocket.

This was a push poll. This is easily the most ignorant of the criticisms, other than the aforementioned ad hominem attacks. I’ve been push-polled several times, and this doesn’t even come close. A push poll attempts to get a specific answer based on feeding the survey subject information that a campaign wants to get out, usually a gossipy tidbit they don’t want to run in an ad. Typically, this would come in a question such as “Would you vote for James Kirk as best Star Trek captain even if you knew that he secretly killed Tribbles in his spare time and refused to promote Chekov because Kirk felt threatened by his popularity among the crew?”

Push polls don’t use multiple-choice answers, at least not in this sense (sometimes they use a scale of likelihood). They don’t even use open-ended questions. They use closed-ended questions to get commitment. They’re specific to a single candidate or party. Zogby’s questions didn’t do any of that. They asked about specific events and gave four potential people for respondents to associate with these events.

Zogby’s polls have plenty of room for criticism, but these aren’t valid at all.

No surprise. Unfortunately, the drive-by’s will never go away, IMO. The big corporations will continue to run the news despite being in the red.

Question is, can they be countered? Sure, there is the “new media” but can it reach those in the video?

rightside on November 19, 2008 at 7:42 AM

When you use NPR and BBC as your information sources you will be just as ill-informed as if you rely on Stewart aka Leibowitz, Colbert and SNL’s Weekend Update. If these are your news sources you don’t want to be informed you expect entertainment and indoctrination.

Weren’t these the same liberal who whined and complained that 80% of the US was stupid because, when polled, they didn’t realize that they had been lied about going into Iraq and that they needed to be educated on the facts?

I think it’s funny that the Obama supporters still get their panties all twisted if anyone points out the truth about their “leader”, or in this case the media that delivered him to the masses. Maybe they see the writing on the wall of a future with buyers remorse. (kind of like an American car owner)

Both sides are ignorant because they use only news sources that agree with their outlook. It’s NPR and BBC on one side and Rush and Fox on the other. People focus more on the entertainment value than actual facts, so a “scandal” like SP’s clothes is more fun to pay attention to that statements about the coal industry.
We get what we deserve because we voted for it.

Same reaction that the Libs had in 1994 when Charles Murray published The Bell Curve.

Now that I think about it, the libs have also had a pretty similar reaction to the Prop 8 results out in California.

So now that we know in advance how they will respond, certainly we can figure out other opportunities to manipulate them. If not in ways that will result in electoral wins, then lets just “play them” for the hell of it.

If they revel in displaying their abject stupidity, let’s make it easy for them.

It wasn’t to show Obama voters as ignorant, but the media as complicit in ensuring that they remained ignorant, at least in terms of Obama.

The unintentional consequence of exposing the media’s complicity certainly provides the level of “informed” intelligence of the typical Obama voter. This does not excuse the media’s impact on this election as much as the state of mind of large portion of our electorate that have little or no ability to comprehend or dissect information.

Translation: The dumbing down process of our higher education process is sadly working.

Both sides are ignorant because they use only news sources that agree with their outlook. It’s NPR and BBC on one side and Rush and Fox on the other. People focus more on the entertainment value than actual facts, so a “scandal” like SP’s clothes is more fun to pay attention to that statements about the coal industry.
We get what we deserve because we voted for it.

dpierson on November 19, 2008 at 8:12 AM

This is entirely incorrect. You forget, the Right consists of two wings: Libertarians and Conservatives.

I’m a Libertarian, and I listen to Limbaugh, Hannity, and other Conservatives, just as I listen to libertarians like Dennis Miller, Boortz and Larry Elder. And I have numerous Conservative friends who listen to Miller, Boortz, Elder, Tammy Bruce, et.al. They probably cringe when the issue of drug legalization or repealing the income tax is brought up, but they still listen.

The Left, on the other hand, is monolithic. All Leftists want bigger government. And they all spout off the same Nanny-state nonsense, be it Bill Mahr, Jon Stewart, NPR, CNN, Newsweek, whomever.

There is no “Libertarian” counterpart on the Left. There is no second wing, if you will, as there is on the Right.

Rightists are routinely exposed to both Libertarian and Conservative views. Leftists only get Pro-Statist.

It wasn’t to show Obama voters as ignorant, but the media as complicit in ensuring that they remained ignorant, at least in terms of Obama.

That still doesn’t excuse them from getting educated. John Stossel did some man on the street interviews and came away from the exercise asking if ignorant people should be allowed to vote. We can’t blame the media forever. And as soon as we stop doing so, the sooner we can focus on humiliating the douche bags who voted for him.

And I haven’t met an Obama voter that isn’t an ignorant boob or a partisan hack. They may be well meaning ignorant boobs, but they are ignorant boobs non the less.

In all fairness, using YouTube comments as a yardstick for liberal reaction isn’t exactly fair. About 80% of everyone commenting at YouTube is completely crazy. Any slightly controversial video gets posted and 5 minutes later all the mouth breathers from Toon Town descend on it to claim that Jesus fired a space laser at the lizard people to warn us about the Chinese Olympics.

In all fairness, using YouTube comments as a yardstick for liberal reaction isn’t exactly fair. About 80% of everyone commenting at YouTube is completely crazy. Any slightly controversial video gets posted and 5 minutes later all the mouth breathers from Toon Town descend on it to claim that Jesus fired a space laser at the lizard people to warn us about the Chinese Olympics.

This poll is great. If it keeps conservatives thinking they lost because of the media…..

Tom_Shipley on November 19, 2008 at 8:21 AM

I love threads like this because it draws out the ignorant liberals. And they oblige us by proving how stupid they are by always missing the point about the liberal bias of the MSM. McCain was democrat lite. That is why he lost.

Shipley, you are without a doubt, the most ignorant full of $hit troll this site has lately. You are so full of it that every time you open your mouth, little balls of $hit come rolling out.

The really sad thing is that the fate of the free world has now been determined by a vote that was dominated by people who were not only too stupid to grasp the gravity of what they were doing, but we also too stupid to grasp the idea that they are stupid, even when it is clearly demonstrated. The Obama Administration will be a reflection of that stupidity. It can’t be any other way. And we’ll all suffer in the process.

We lost because the Republican Party did not run a Conservative candidate for POTUS. God bless Mac for his service to this country, but he is too simular to the Democratic Party on several of the issues. The Republicans will not win another Presidential Election as long as they continue to court the Beltway Elite.

A couple of days before the election, I laid out my case for McCain, point by point for my coworker. She had little to rebut. At the end of the conversatiion, she just said, I’m not voting for him, and I hate talking politics, because I don’t know enough. That was the Obama voter. My deeply religious 18 year old, she is not that versed in politics, fought herself internally, as it was ingrained in her that she would be a racist if she did not vote for Obama. Although, it is a secret ballot, she told me she voted McCain.

Ziegler’s offered a double-or-nothing deal to anyone who wants to recreate the same poll for McCain voters.

Let me be the first to say someone will probably go to a fair amount of trouble to make him lose that bet. I hope he specified that the participant screening process had to run the same way as his did.

Both sides are ignorant because they use only news sources that agree with their outlook.

dpierson on November 19, 2008 at 8:12 AM

OK, then you have the opportunity to make your point and Zeigler will pay for it. All you have to do is do the same exercise with McCain voters and get the same responses.

csdeven on November 19, 2008 at 8:31 AM

Yes, you know the point hits home when leftists pull out the “both sides are pretty much equal on this” hogwash. No way you pick 12 Republicans out of a line and have all 12 of them be completely uniformed or grossly misinformed about all of the candidates. and the poll? No way you get Republicans scoring lower than guesswork should have scored on everything except Palin smears.

In all fairness, using YouTube comments as a yardstick for liberal reaction isn’t exactly fair. About 80% of everyone commenting at YouTube is completely crazy. Any slightly controversial video gets posted and 5 minutes later all the mouth breathers from Toon Town descend on it to claim that Jesus fired a space laser at the lizard people to warn us about the Chinese Olympics.

Lehosh on November 19, 2008 at 8:27 AM

Plus the paid bloggers by Obama/DNC that swarm to the comments section on any website that talks about Obama.

The media used an old advertising trick, one which amounts to subliminal messaging, a form of (for want of a better term) hypnotic suggestion. The constant reinforcement of an idea or set of ideas, which would resonate with the voter however intelligent, were what influenced most Americans on election day. The people Zeigler interviewed at the time probably couldn’t tell you in any detail why they voted the way they did.

If you think television can’t have this effect, you’re probably some troll with entirely too much time on his hands, but who is incapable of dealing with complex subject matter, but never mind that, watch what happens when your kids walk into a room when the TV is on. They are transfixed to it. Most of the time, adults are no different.

The perennial bias of the mainstream media dovetailed very nicely with the “branding” concept of the Obama campaign. His people knew exactly how to reach the voters, without offering much of anything in the way of either experience or substance.

We chose a President in much the same fashion as we would buy a car or a toothpaste. Fortunately, our Founding Fathers knew that too much power in the hands of one person led to corruption. So they developed a system of checks and balances. The thing for concerned Americans to do now, is to avail themselves of that system, to keep the damage of this presidency to a minimum.

I hate it when people compare the two. BBC/NPR/CNN are supposed to be neutral. They are supposed to be unbiased. When you get news from BBC or NPR you are supposedly getting a ‘just the facts’ report. Many people know it is biased, but many don’t. And those people hear stuff like Palin censored books on NPR and figure well it’s a “news” show it must be true.

On the other hand, talk radio is opinion. Rush doesn’t pretend to be unbiased. He tells you his opinion. People listen to him and take whatever he says with a grain of salt because they know he is slanting the information.

So please stop equating MSM bias with Rush bias. Not even close to the same thing.

One wonders why the Republican Party and McCain campaign were not out polling people on these same questions and then tweaking their message, advertising and campaign to address this lack of knowledge by voters of the candidates.

In all fairness, using YouTube comments as a yardstick for liberal reaction isn’t exactly fair. About 80% of everyone commenting at YouTube is completely crazy. Any slightly controversial video gets posted and 5 minutes later all the mouth breathers from Toon Town descend on it to claim that Jesus fired a space laser at the lizard people to warn us about the Chinese Olympics.

Well….it is a push poll, designed to push the meme that media bias cost McCain/Palin the election.
There is no experimental design, no null hypothesis, and some questions were illformed, like the question about Palin and Russia which actually has no correct answer.
So the only results that can be drawn are anecdotal.
This is a fine anecdotal documentary effort, but Zogby cannot say anything statistically significant about results, because they didn’t practice statistical polling techniques.
This effort is peer with a Michael Moore documentary….there are no statistical results, only anectdotal ones.

The data is corrupted by bias, is what I mean.
But if Zeigler wanted to say something statistically significant about Obama voters, he wasted his money.
It is rather unethical of Zogby to take his money and not explain that to him, but w/e.
Caveat emptor.

Which is how the Dems were able to increase majorities when their Congress has a 9% approval rating. When people like this think that the Republicans are still running Congress when they haven’t for two years, it’s no wonder.

You are missing my point. The fact that the people you all converse with are willing to talk about politics in the first place is because they know more than the average person. The people who do not know much about politics are not willing to talk about less they come over as ignorant – this is normal human behavior. If you looked into the head of the average American you would find more sports scores and entertainment news than knowledge of current events. This problem is then amplified by selecting single source news outlets because it further shields them from viewpoints or opinions they are not comfortable with.
The fact that NPR/BBC/CNN should be neutral ignores that fact that they are not. Rush/Hannity etc. are clearly opinion programs (and open about it) but they still represent a single source of information.
So conservatives have two choices: Pick a celebrity candidate that the media swoons over to get MSM coverage and create the positive image voters seems to use to make their choice, or get a candidate that so clearly represents the average Americans that even the dimmest guy knows to vote for them. Palin/Romney/Jindal are neither.

So conservatives have two choices: Pick a celebrity candidate that the media swoons over to get MSM coverage and create the positive image voters seems to use to make their choice, or get a candidate that so clearly represents the average Americans that even the dimmest guy knows to vote for them. Palin/Romney/Jindal are neither.

dpierson on November 19, 2008 at 9:33 AM

This whole premise is based on the assumption that any conservative is going to get the coverage to accomplish what you say we need to do….ain’t gonna happen. Duh…

I love threads like this because it draws out the ignorant liberals. And they oblige us by proving how stupid they are by always missing the point about the liberal bias of the MSM.

No kidding. I remember a study that was done after ’04 that basically said Kerry gained about 15 percentage points from the positive media coverage. If the coverage was balanced and unbiased like it’s supposed to be that election would’ve been a Bush landslide.

With the media basically abdicating their responsibility in their zeal to get Obama elected (I didn’t think it was possible for the media to sink any lower than they did in ’04. Boy, was I suprised), I would be willing to guess Obama got at least 20 points just from the coverage.

McCain was democrat lite. That is why he lost.

This was the other problem. McCain was a bad candidate running a bad campaign. I really think that even through the media storm any other candidate could’ve beat Obama. He was the weakest candidate the Dems have put up in decades (the fact that right until the eve of the election they were tied in a statistical dead heat in most of the more reliable polls proves that) and our guy couldn’t beat him.

Which is how the Dems were able to increase majorities when their Congress has a 9% approval rating.
crazy_legs on November 19, 2008 at 9:25 AM

Exactly. Perceptions matter. Facts, not so much.

Somehow conservatives must develop a superior capacity to shape public perceptions. When it comes to elections, perceptions are the only reality that matters, and our over-reliance on rational discourse, at the expense of emotional appeals, is deadly. Further, the more our society gets dumbed down, the more deadly it will become.

Actually did happen. McCain got excellent coverage from the MSM when he ran in the primaries against GW. He was the Republican everyone in the media liked– which should have been a red flag to start with.
But if you are right and no Republican will ever get the media coverage than look at my second choice. Select a candidate that actually represents basic American values, is trustworthy and has proven experience in executive positions. There has got to be a qualified governor around somewhere (not Arnie)

McCain got excellent coverage from the MSM when he ran in the primaries against GW. He was the Republican everyone in the media liked– which should have been a red flag to start with.

No kidding. We really have to end the open primary business. Cross-over libs voted for McCain in the early primaries, and by the time we got to the real Republican primaries it was too late for everyone else.

As an aside, my wife is supposed to be registered as an Independant. Found out that after the NH primary (she voted as a Republican) the polling place re-registered her as a Dem. Boy was she pissed.

Follow the money, folks. If you want to go over the heads of the leftist babblers, you will have to overwhelm them with your own messaging. Public financing of election campaigns is dead, dead, dead! RIP.

I’ll say it. This is racist and it’s actually the easiest thing to see. How many African American supporters are part of the video and part of the poll. What percentage of Obama’s vote was African American. Yeah…they aren’t even close to being the same thing.

Look, when the right loses they try and discredit the other side. In 1992 they lied and claimed Clinton only won because of Perot when exit polls consistently showed that Perot took votes from both Bush and Clinton in 1992 and that Perot took more votes from Clinton in 1996. And now they are trying to claim that Americans are “ignorant” for caring more about Obama’s healthcare/energy/tax policy than knowing the details of various right wing attacks.

Big 3 executives refuse to negotiate their overspending. UAW refuses to renegotiate their bloated compensation packages for Union membersbut have no problem with 400 million donations to DNC. Let ’em crumble and a responsible alternative will emerge. If union members don’t realize that any% of something is better than 0% of nothing they deserve their fate.

“Would you vote for James Kirk as best Star Trek captain even if you knew that he secretly killed Tribbles in his spare time and refused to promote Chekov because Kirk felt threatened by his popularity among the crew?”

The poll Ziegler commissioned has an inadvertent control — the Palin questions. These respondents were highly cognizant of Sarah Palin’s details, but not of Obama or Biden’s. That reflects on the media more than the voters, and most people missed the point of this exercise. It wasn’t to show Obama voters as ignorant, but the media as complicit in ensuring that they remained ignorant, at least in terms of Obama.

Ed, everyone seem to still be missing the point… oh wait not missing it but wanting to continue to bash obama’s followers and paid bloggers. (Give it a rest will you?) In my few comments in the chat, I have repeatedly talked about the dumbing down of America and of course this video proves it to be true. Do I believe, given the same number of people who voted for McCain, that they would do as poorly educated? I pray they would not but I have no guarantee.

Yes, the press played a key role in turning the tide of this election, more than 75 years ago. About the time FDR took office and they became the speaking voice for his administration.

Yes, schools played a part in this election being lost when God and the laws He gave us to follow were removed from public education. It was done for the good of the one, not the good of the whole. Which has now progressed to the point that the good of the one means ever child will only be taught a standardized curriculum for a test that limits our children to lives of servitude to an ever expanding national/international government.

No, we did nothing to stop any of those things from happening. We continued to elect people into office who only wanted to expand their own agendas. Now we are faced with one of the most selfish, self centered leaders in history. And 57+ million of us act amazed. Is he going to fail? Of course he is, it is inevitable. Not because of himself, but because we will continue to only look four to eight years into the future.

Going back and reading the history of events leading to the “Great Depression” it is evident that Americans as a whole had become just as complacent and self centered as they are today. We have raised a generation of children who believe they are born with the right to be respected without accomplishing anything beyond being born. The you owe me generation. Now they are giving birth to a generation of children that believe they have the right to not only be respected, but to destroy anyone who stands against their beliefs. Example: An 8-year-old boy accused in the shooting death of his father. It is not the first or the last time this will occur I am sure.

Yes, it can all be changed, fixed in many ways. But, it requires us to begin to educate ourselves and those around us to the truth of what caused us to arrive at this point in history. We have been given the greatest tools to do this by using the Internet. Look at the number of views the Ziegler video has accumulated since being posted. (516,143 when I began writing this post.)That many people could have been educated with the truth about the true conditions of this country. The problem with the video is while it may be stated that it was made to show the failure of the media in educating the public, it appears to bash obama voters. It does show us that we now have the ability to reach millions of people and take this country back to the world leaders we once were.

Everyone fears that the coming obama administration will gag the Internet. That there will be a civil war, race war, another great depression etc. Only if we fail to use the tools available. We have seen the result of not using the Internet during the presidential campaign, other than to create rabbit holes of myth, speculation or bashing. Why would anyone respect us for those things? It was those things that caused so many to vote for an unqualified man to run this country. We continue to act as though elected officials are somehow superhuman or saviors. In spite of their proving repeatedly that they are usually men and women with more baggage than a Barnum & Bailey circus train. I grew up in Mobile, Al. where when someone is elected the bookies begin taking bets as to how long before the official is going to be sent to prison. I have seen very few of our officials in D.C. who do not belong in jail for their behavior with our lives.

For all of the posters here, why do we have to continue to respond to e-pirate, Tom_Shipley and the other democratic based bashers? They are allowed to continue posting here to keep the site active because we have become too lazy and complacent to carry on conversations without a differing view. When I want to understand where they are coming from in their opinions I go to their blogs and sites and read their work. While their input raises the number of posts in a thread count, we loose track of the purpose of the thread. The purpose of the thread and a site like this is to educate anyone reading them. Most posts that have anything to do with politics spiral into “You’re stupid, No you’re stupid” before the end of the first page. There are things said that I would love to be able to share here with my 14 year old but I can not let her read the thread because it embarrasses me to have her see grown men and women behave this way.

Michelle, Ed and Allah thank you for the many hours it takes to keep this site up and running. For anyone reading this… A politician is not going to fix any of the problems we have. We have to fix them. We have to do the work day in and day out. It is time for us all to become as American as Samuel Joseph Wurtzlebacher and ask those we are going to elect to run the government for us how they intend to take care of the whole without reducing it to another socialist/marxist/communist doomed to fail country.

And for those that will rant that this is just another “Can’t we all just get along” post, it’s actually a, we all better learn to get along before there is nothing left to call American but what we can sell on Ebay as collectible memorabilia.
In the words of a fictional Bayou la Batre man…
“That’s all I’ve got to say about that.”

My favorite is the chick who refers to Palin as “That woman” before sticking her tounge out. Then says, “Oh, I don’t have a TV” before going on about how she gets her news from John Stewart and Steven Colbert.

dpierson: Rush Limbaugh’s listeners, year after year, in surveys have been found as either the first or second most intelligent audience of any media-TV or radio. Like many critics of Rush you fall into the trap of thinking that Rush is some sort of Pied Piper who has created as he says ‘mind-numbed’ robots that follow his ‘marching orders’. Nothing is further from the truth. When he engages his callers, Rush is always polite and civil, and more often than not a fruitful, enlightening dialogue occurs and his audience becomes more attuned to what is going on in the world on a daily basis.

Technopeasant: I do not think this is so hard to understand. I listen to Rush all the time to, but I also get information from other sources, do research and make up my own mind.
Let me restate this more clearly: If you get your news from a single source then you are not thinking on your own. Question everything you hear until you have validated it on your own and do not fall into the trap of only listing to people who agree with you. – Think!